Hollywood Orchard is currently working with a local artist to create a natural & cultural history of Los Angeles in the form of four murals that will cover 3 buildings on the campus of Cheremoya Elementary, a Title I school at the base of Beachwood Canyon. The murals will not only beautify the school grounds, but also support educational experiences that give the children a deeper understanding of where they live, and foster connection to the natural world. 

about the PROJECT

Since mid-2018, we have been working with a local artist, Elkpen, Gabrieleno-Tongva & Chumash advisors, and the schoolchildren, to create an interdisciplinary, natural & cultural history series, “mapping” the Los Angeles watershed and its inhabitants. The murals will cover four walls across three buildings, all of which face into the schoolyard, creating expanded outdoor learning space that interfaces with the native gardens.

The murals, while educational, are designed to give the children an intimate understanding of where they live, and encourage the notions of Community Science and Earth Stewardship. We also intend to develop programming to inspire the creation literary and visual stories of arts & ecology, their own cultural identities, and wherever else their imagination takes them.

about the artist

Elkpen is a Los Angeles artist who tells stories about neighborhoods and natural history. Her drawings, signs, and murals have been shown and installed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Canada, and Mexico. She also created the design for the LA River Rover. For more information and work samples, please visit elkpen.com and Elkology, Instagram & Trashcomic

educational opportunities

While our work with Cheremoya children dates back to 2012, Elkpen and volunteers from Hollywood Orchard have already begun to provide mural-related opportunities for the children, focusing on the core belief behind the mural project: connection. Exploring interrelationships between ourselves and the land, the sun and moon, our ancestors – the entire natural world, past and present. We have lead science-based art workshops for students from grades K-6th, and done several native planting workshops with the Cheremoya community. Once all four of the murals are up, the interactive learning potential for most any academic discipline is pretty much limitless, and identification and relationship games are rigged througout.

DONATE TODAY

From scaffolding to paint to notebooks for the students to journal in, we have a lot of expenses to cover. Please consider donating to the project, as it will not only improve the grounds of our local school, but also serve as a learning tool that will inspire the next generation to connect to the natural world around them.